Sounds of 19th century are reawakened
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German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck
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NEW YORK -- Tucked away for decades in a cabinet in Thomas Edison's laboratory, just behind the cot in which the great inventor napped, a trove of wax cylinder phonograph records has been brought back to life after more than a century of silence.
The cylinders, from 1889 and 1890, include the only known recording of the voice of the powerful German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. Two preserve the voice of Helmuth von Moltke, a venerable German military strategist, reciting lines from Shakespeare and from Goethe's "Faust" into a phonograph horn. (Moltke was 89 when he made the recordings -- the only ones known to survive from someone born as early as 1800.)
Other records found in the collection hold musical treasures -- lieder and rhapsodies performed by German and Hungarian singers and pianists at the apex of the Romantic era, including what is thought to be the first recording of a work by Chopin.
Officials at Edison's old laboratory in West Orange, N.J., now Thomas Edison National Historical Park, unveiled the newly identified recordings Monday.
"This is sensational," said Ulrich Lappenkueper, director of the Otto von Bismarck Foundation in Friedrichsruh, Germany. The Bismarck cylinder is documented in the foundation's archive, but after searching for it in the United States and Germany since 2005, Mr. Lappenkueper and his colleagues assumed that it had been lost forever.
The unlabeled recordings, all housed in the same wooden box, had been found in 1957. But their contents remained unknown until last year, when Edison laboratory curator Jerry Fabris used a playback device called the Archeophone to trace the grooves of 12 of the 17 cylinders in the box and convert the analog electrical signals into broadcast WAV files.
He then enlisted two sound historians, Patrick Feaster of Indiana University and Stephan Puille of the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin, to help identify the faint recordings. The lid of the box held an important clue. It had been scratched with the words "Wangemann. Edison."
The first name refers to Adelbert Theodor Edward Wangemann, who joined the laboratory in 1888, assigned to transform Edison's newly perfected wax cylinder phonograph into a marketable device for listening to music. Wangemann became expert in such strategies as positioning musicians around the recording horn to maximize sound quality.
In June 1889, Edison sent Wangemann to Europe, initially to ensure that the phonograph at the Paris World's Fair remained in working order. After Paris, Wangemann toured his native Germany, recording musical artists and often visiting homes of prominent members of society who were fascinated with the talking machine.
Until now, the only available recording from Wangemann's trip to Europe has been a well-known and well-worn cylinder of Brahms playing an excerpt from his first Hungarian Dance. That recording is so damaged "that many listeners can scarcely discern the sound of a piano, which has in turn tarnished the reputations of both Wangemann and the Edison phonograph of the late 1880s," Mr. Feaster said. "These newly unearthed examples vindicate both."
In October 1889, Wangemann and his wife visited Bismarck, then 74 and chancellor of the German empire, at his castle in Friedrichsruh. Bismarck listened to recordings made in Paris and Berlin, and at his wife's urging, made his own. He recited snippets of poetry and songs in English, Latin, French and German. Perhaps surprisingly, given his Franco-Prussian War involvement, he chose to recite lines from the French national anthem.
"Bismarck was a very, very witty man" and reciting the Marseillaise "would tickle him," said University of Pennsylvania historian Jonathan Steinberg, author of the new biography "Bismarck: A Life."
Mr. Puille, the sound historian in Berlin, said it was not easy to identify Bismarck's voice. But after he deciphered a reference to Friedrichsruh, Bismarck's estate, in the announcement of one of the cylinders, "I immediately knew that I was on the right track," he continued in an email.
First Published January 31, 2012 12:00 am
